A Catholic Take on Earth Day
A blessed first day of spring to all our readers! As we make our way through our Lenten pilgrimage, Easter is on its way. As the Council of Nicaea decreed in 325, the great Solemnity of the Resurrection would be celebrated on the first Sunday, after the first full moon, after the vernal equinox. So hope, always hope. Today is also ‘Earth Day’, and here are some revised thoughts on that modern pagan commemoration, which I first wrote about five or so years ago, but are more relevant now than ever. The climate hysteria has only metastasized, and we in Canada have a Prime Minister in Canada who is a true zealot. More on that shortly. For now, we give thanks for this beautiful blue planet God has given us. To paraphrase the Catechism says, the Earth was made for Man, not Man for the Earth.
‘Earth Day’, first officially celebrated on this day in 1970, with its roots in the nascent environmentalist movement, Rachel Carson’s 1962 Silent Spring, the exaggerated effects of DDT and everything else, back-to-the-landers, hippies reacting against the bourgeois mentality of their (to their jaded eyes) stultified, suburban post-War upbringing, and so on. There was no global warming back then – in fact, the fear, if anything, was a return to another ice age (which may be still more likely).
It is a day I normally don’t commemorate, as an ideologically motivated celebration. That said, I do very much believe in a ‘Catholic ecology’ and stewardship – all in its proper order, in the right way. The purpose of life here is not to maintain this planetary ‘spaceship’ for as long as possible, before, as the late Stephen Hawking suggested, finding a way to space travel and populate other planets. No, the form of this world is passing away, and will end at some point in the future chosen beforehand in the mystery of God’s will, when these heavens and this Earth will be dissolved, and anyone left alive will go the way of all flesh. All of us will be judged on our faith in the one true God and His Church; on our hope in what endures and is of perennial value; and, most of all, our love, charity, for the same God, and our fellow human beings.
Everything else, as Saint Paul says, is dross, if not used for these ends, and especially if goes contrary to them.
We do believe that a proper care for this beautiful planet is part of that love for God and neighbour – for who wants to live in a polluted, smog-infested garbage dump, a la much of industrialized China? We can all do our own part – keep our local environment as clean and even presentable as we might. In my own numerous forays into the great outdoors, I often pick up garbage. But the cleanliness of the Earth is not for its own sake, but so that it may be enjoyed by humans throughout our generations in a rightly ordered way.
As the Catechism (#338) succinctly puts it:
God created everything for man.
And (#343): Man is the summit of the Creator’s work
Too many modern environmentalists are riddled with Manicheism, an ancient and recurring anti-human ideology prompts them not only to see ‘nature’ as good for its own sake, but their fellow humans as a metastasizing cancer in the very protoplasm of Gaia. One can almost feel their schadenfreude that draconian Covid restrictions stopped most of the planes, trains and automobiles, along with factories and mines and machines – the whole ‘carbon-belching’ economy at a standstill. That, dear reader, is their vision of the future.
Oh, they think, to have a world with far, far fewer of carbon-polluting humans! A number of those – the ‘environmentally conscious’ elite – will keep their sprawling mansions and jets to fly to climate conferences at various exotic locales. Was it not the recently deceased Prince Philip – God rest his soul – who once mused in a gaffe that he’d like to be reincarnated as a deadly virus to reduce the world’s population, so that other creatures might have a chance?
I just wonder what it would be like to be reincarnated in an animal whose species had been so reduced in numbers than it was in danger of extinction. What would be its feelings toward the human species whose population explosion had denied it somewhere to exist… I must confess that I am tempted to ask for reincarnation as a particularly deadly virus, but that is perhaps going too far.
Pope Francis in Laudato Si has repeated the traditional doctrine that Man is the summit of creation, even if we may demur in his own Earth Day address that the planet is ‘at its limit’. At its limit for what, one might ask? God have provided plenty for us humans, if we but expend the industry and ingenuity to release the potential in His abundant creative work.
One also wonders what might be the real agenda behind Senator Cortez’ unhinged ‘Green-Plan’, which would almost destroy what we know as ‘free market society’, perhaps even abolish private property, and freedom itself. As Our Lady of Fatima warned, without our repentance and metanoia, the errors of Communism – a secular messianism, the very religion of antichrist – would spread around the world, and we’re seeing more evidence of that prophecy with each passing day.
On a hopeful note, we know that the victory is not his, nor theirs, in the end. We are made for a far more glorious homeland than this Earth, as beautiful as it is, and as beautiful as we should maintain it. So, if your vocation be to marriage and family, go forth and multiply, so that many persons made in God’s image might enjoy this beautiful, God-given world, before an eternity with the same God in beatitude.
As Pope Gregory the Great warns in a sermon: We don’t want to end up like the foolish traveller who is so distracted by the pleasant meadows through which he is passing that he forgets where he is going.
Just so.
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